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The Unstarving Musician


The Unstarving Musician’s Podcast features interviews with indie music artists an industry pros who share their experience and expertise on songwriting, recording, touring, getting gigs, marketing, and much more. It’s all intended to help indie artists to more of what they love–make music.

Oct 11, 2019

Adam and Michael Scharff are longtime working musicians and music teachers. These days they’re in the world of virtual artist artist development. With a focus on mentoring artists, Adam and Michael offer a compliment of production, writing, recording services. Their podcast Mentoring for the Modern Day Musician features the advice and expertise of the Scharff brothers, designed to help music artists shorten the learning curve of navigating the rapidly changing music business.

Episode Highlights

We start the interview with some ice-breakers where we discover that Adam learned Latin and that Michael’s first instrument was the violin. We go on to discuss:

  • The origins of Mentoring for the Modern Musician
  • Being easy to work with
  • Focusing on live performances for success
  • The pros and cons of a 360 label deal
  • Focusing on why your audience cares about your music, message and brand

Key Points

  • Connect with your fans by treating them like real people - they are.
  • Figure out what it is about you that will make others come back to learn more.

Quotable

“The artists that stay are the artists that never really stop the [artist development] process.”

—Michael Scharff

“The superfan is gonna consume everything you have. They’re going to support you on Patreon.”

—Michael Scharff

“Fans are actually real human beings with wants and desires and needs and stories. They’re the ones you can count on to have a career, so it’s important to treat them like a real human.” 

—Adam Scharff

“You have to be willing to unlearn something, then relearn it again.” 

—Michael Scharff

Visit UnstarvingMusician.com for more on this and other episodes.